Curating and Sharing Missional Ideas

David Bennett | 17 Oct 2017

‘Connecting influencers and ideas for global mission’—that is the mission of the Lausanne Movement.

Some powerful ideas have been introduced, promoted, and made actionable through the Lausanne Movement over the past four decades, including unreached (and unengaged) people groups, the 10/40 window, children at risk, city movements, creation care as a gospel issue, business as mission, the priority of partnerships and collaboration, integral mission, and more.

Ideas matter. Ideas have consequences. Ideas spread from one person to another through influencers and their networks; through personal conversations; through emails; through blog postings; through ‘likes’ on Facebook; through face-to-face meetings.

But for careful discussion, thoughtful and strategic action, appropriate contextualization, collaborative implementation, and enduring impact, those ideas benefit from being gathered into books, formal papers, journal articles, audio files, and video presentations. Seminal ideas deserve to be preserved and presented for careful, prayerful pondering. This is the reason Lausanne prioritizes and publishes so much content, and why nearly every gathering convened by Lausanne culminates in the publication and production of new statements, papers, books, videos, and the like. In recent weeks, the first papers from our Wealth Creation consultation have been published and added to our ever-growing Missional Content Library.

We like to think of ourselves as curators. An art museum generally has far more pieces in its collection than are put on display at any given time. Most museums exhibit less than 10 percent of their entire collections. In fact, larger museums like the Louvre, the largest museum in the world, have only two to three percent of their collections on public exhibition. The role of the curator is to select materials for the collections, to choose which ones to highlight for exhibitions, to decide how best to display them, and to help interpret those materials and place them in context for the visitor.

Our Lausanne Content ‘collection’ now includes:

  • Over 60 Lausanne Occasional Papers, which are historically important documents that have emerged from global consultations;
  • More than 120 Lausanne Global Analysis (LGA) articles available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese languages—LGA celebrates its fifth year with its thirtieth issue, providing analysis and implications drawn from events and trends from every region of the world;
  • The Lausanne Bookstore, with books emerging from the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in 2010, from Lausanne global consultations that have been held since then, as well as more recent titles that expand on themes in The Cape Town Commitment;
  • More than 300 videos from Lausanne gatherings, including Cape Town 2010 and the 2016 Younger Leaders Gathering in Jakarta;
  • And a new stream of content currently under development called the Lausanne Global Classroom, for which a beta episode is now available.

The Louvre collection in its entirety is so large that it would take all day, every day for 100 days, spending just 30 seconds viewing each piece of art, to see everything. The Lausanne Content collection is not that large, of course—but it is already extensive enough that we’ve been working as curators to handpick a Best of Lausanne item each week for you. You will receive some of the best content from over forty years—an article, video, or other missional resource—delivered straight to your inbox each week (or monthly).

One of our values as Lausanne is to make our content freely and widely available as much as possible, as gifts to the church. So we encourage you to explore the treasures. Share them with a friend. Discuss them with a colleague. Consider the implications for ministry in your context. Connect other influencers in your networks with these ideas—for global mission!

Explore more than 700 missional resources

David Bennett is Global Associate Director for the Lausanne Movement and Congress Director for the Seoul 2024 Congress. David has served with Lausanne for many years, and has a range of ministry and missional experience. He also brings with him a wealth of relational capital, global understanding, and kingdom insight.